Actually I was under the impression that the hardware was powerful enough to be capable of running Playstation and N64 games - the GP2X, it's spiritual predecessor, was basically "everything up to Playstation". The Pandora is still allegedly the most powerful dedicated gaming handheld (compared to eg. PSP and DS) and has a good range of controls and expansion. I think that makes it reasonably interesting even though it's not as powerful as a smartphone. It'd be nice if they were able to rev the hardware to be more competitive with the high end handhelds again, though - maybe once they've sold a few they'll be able to do that, now their production chain is established.
Absolutely! Just worth bearing in mind that Intel's part-way solution of simply sharing a package is better in more ways than just being physically smaller. In that sense it's potentially a step up from the state of the art, even though it's a step behind a fully integrated solution.
I thought integration in the same package allowed (presumably for electrical reasons - very small physical distance, not limited by number of pins you can fit) a faster interconnect between the two dies, so there actually is (potentially) some advantage to doing it, even though it's not proper dual core.
Well, it violates their "family safe" goal / excuse, doesn't it? The other things referenced are also legal to enjoy (though in virtual sense in the case of excessive violence) yet frowned upon morally by some and definitely not generally considered family safe these days. The point is that Apple are again giving the lie to the excuses they've made when rejecting some other apps.
I don't know. Each time I get locked out of a product I've paid for on the grounds that I'm a pirate, I start to wonder if I should (having paid for the product) then use a cracked, pirated copy that won't lock me out. You could argue that that's a step towardsme giving up on paying but I really do *want* to pay a fair price, I just don't want there to be an effective surcharge in time and effort required to work around broken copy protection:-(
Reminds me of the days when you needed a password to access any given level of the game so you couldn't jump ahead - except implemented in software so that your *PC* doesn't cheat. Insane.
You're selling hardware, you're selling a high-end closed source database. Why bother annoying the customers by also charging for OS and runtime stuff that's pretty much a commodity?
"was added as part of an attempt to highlight how few customers read the terms and conditions of an online sale."
Interesting. To me it looks like an example of how retailers drown customers in excessive terms and conditions, leaving the retailer free to make unreasonable demands in bad faith if they so choose. I realise that GameStation were illustrating (in a humourous way, it was funny and good-natured) something that's worth knowing - that you are agreeing to whatever that says (in principle, subject to whether a court upholds the contract, you then have to abide by it). But really, if I want to buy a game in a bricks and mortar shop I just buy it, I don't have to wade through pages of T&Cs on my own time. That happens when I open the box;-)
GameStation have moved their T&C page so that you don't even have to look at them during the order process, so it's not really surprising if people are treating their online shop like... a shop.
With MeeGo (the Moblin-Maemo offspring), surely we could have a tablet that was more open than the iPad and closer to a standard Linux to develop for than Android. You could have an OMAP or an Atom processor depending on your price / performance / power draw constraints. If Dalvik's VM etc ran on it you could even have Android applications. That'd be far more attractive to me, giving me access to more applications whilst still retaining advantages for development and openness.
Though since rather addressed, there were grumbles early on that Apple weren't running the project in a co-operative way - they were abiding by the letter but not the spirit of the open source licensing. It's their right to do this but it used to upset people when Apple got credit for "contributing" when they were doing the bare minimum. But I think they reformed the WebKit project a lot and they're working rather in the open now, so I'm not sure that (generally) so much of this historical attitude remains at large.
The architecture is nice (IMHO) but the obscene amounts of cache do make it look bloated in terms of silicon required. This is partly because it's a high-end chip, of course. But perhaps Intel were also having to take a brute-force approach to performance there (throwing transistors at it) rather than an efficient solution. I'd be sorry to see IA64 go, though, I really liked the design of the instruction set.
Whilst I didn't like various of Russell T Davies work on Doctor Who, it is worth remembering that he brought it back from the dead, which was good. Whatever my personal feelings on who Also, I thought some of his scarier episodes (e.g. Midnight, Waters of Mars) were really very good at comparable to some of Moffat's stuff (hard to measure up to Blink, though).
Maybe (and I shudder as I say this) finding a way of supplying some of the more common search needs through channels that they control, rather than having people go out into the unruly and unstructured internet. They can't improve on Google's UI as such but maybe they can "improve" on the directedness of the search contents.
I still think the open approach wins out in the end since it's more powerful and gains more network effects - but Apple generally do very well at producing a comparatively locked-down solution that does some core things so much better than the existing attempts that people don't mind losing the flexibility... for now.
Apple does well when they change the game, rather than simply trying to win a race on somebody else's terms. They also seem to have a good understanding of where their own strengths lie. I can't see them trying to compete head-on with Google but if they can find a way to make Google's strengths less relevant then I can see them doing that. That said, it's not like Apple doesn't have a few flops / vanity projects under its belt and it is sometimes seen as a company that would potentially set business decisions based on personal feeling. Their compass on business decisions is fairly good overall though, even though I'm not at all keen on the direction they want to take the industry.
How flexible is it in other environments, though? The AIR app pictured is reconfiguring the UI in various ways depending on orientation, moving UI elements from a side-by-side configuration to a vertical configuration depending on orientation, etc. Whether that's clever or not probably depends on how much work the developer had to put in - if differently structured interfaces were coded up manually then that's not so impressive.
If the runtime can reconfigure a set of declared elements in sensible ways, that would be quite cool. Although the app demonstrated is relatively uncomplicated in terms of UI, it'd be interesting to see how this applied to a more complicated example. I did get the impression, from the video, that it was the ability to run flexibly on different screen configurations that they were trying to promote, not so much the fact that the code could run on different devices.
I think the video mentioned open sourcing the code in the future, at which point we'll all be able to see exactly how convenient to program they have managed to make this...
Part of the cleverness here seems to be that the app is (somehow) doing dynamic changes of layout, not just scaling or flowing widgets into a given area, so that you end up with a GUI that looks reasonably sane on different screen sizes, aspect ratios and orientations. That's quite a nifty trick although I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be available in other cross-platform development environments - maybe it already is. Still, I had heard that Flash is good for UI stuff even though we all hate having to run it to access web content.
Has anyone invoked this meme yet? I don't see it. It's relevant in this case because we really are seeing stuff that used to be native code done in the browser. If there's not a C->Javascript translator already then soon there will be. Google's native client can run compiled code. It's starting to look like we can expect a Linux kernel running in a web browser in the next few years. Not obviously that useful but would be cool and you can bet that people will find things to use it for...
Whatsmore, Google makes it easy for a user to find known piracy websites, so they're complicit! If we say that linking to pirate stuff, not the act of copying it, is also illegal then how many steps removed do you need to be before it becomes OK? This is why I don't like the apparently common point of view that these sites "might as well" be infringing copyright.
Agreed that the average users isn't going to care. But don't forget that this isn't a loophole that Sony chose not to close, it's a feature that they publicised in the product they sold. Obnoxious as Microsoft have been with the Xbox in various ways they've only increased the supported feature set (whilst plugging holes that might have enabled me to install Linux - but they were holes, not publicised features). Once you've sold a product to people on the basis that it has a given featureset I don't think it is acceptable to actively remove features, even if they're not popular ones. Ceasing tech support (or even patches) for an unpopular feature is more acceptable. Or a truly optional upgrade that adds other features but removes an existing one.
The trouble with this change is that Sony are removing a feature from every Playstation out there: they're either removing OtherOS or removing PSN. You can't keep both, whether you accept or refuse the update.
If the situation really is as suggested then Sony are behaving very badly. Don't own a PS3 but wish you good luck in getting them to see the error of their ways! With luck they will quickly realise it's a bad plan.
To be fair the guy might have been concentrating on his studies to the exclusion of social networking-type activities. It's a valid point that social networking can be useful in getting onto the employment ladder, although I do think organisations sometimes rely a bit too heavily on personal connections to really get the best out of their recruitment. Still, it's a useful tool to many people who are looking for work and enables you to find the right people to talk to in order to get proper consideration made of your CV (and in some cases to find out where openings are coming and where is good to look).
I can't see the article at the moment for some reason, maybe they didn't like the Slashdotting. But as various people have said, offering the choice to be cured / altered doesn't seem wrong. However, possibly there's a real underlying point that curing these conditions isn't wrong per se but perhaps curing them wouldn't be necessary if we could fix some of society's behaviours. If we didn't always assume that everyone had the same perceptual experience then we wouldn't need to normalise people in order to participate. The flip side of a cure being everyone's choice is the tendency to say "Well, you can get a cure if you want" and not bother to make things accessible to people. Which if they have a fear or moral objections about gene therapy (say) implies pressuring people to do things they're not happy with by excluding them if they don't do the necessary actions to conform.
For the case of colour blindness it's not *that* debilitating for most people and it's probably too small and inconvenient an issue to pervasively "fix" in society any time soon simply because the condition isn't obvious to others and most people don't have it anyhow. Not having the cure isn't a serious problem and having the cure would also provide personal benefits beyond simply conforming, seeing more colours means you're getting more interesting inputs about the world. And various professions "discriminate" somewhat legitimately against colourblindness anyway so having the cure would at least give people options (examples include astronauts, pilots - you really want them to see the red warning light, though I'm skeptical about how much of a difference colour blindness really makes here if you still know where the lights are!). So I don't see that there's a great risk of unduly pressuring people to conform with this treatment.
There's a wider issue, though, which could become significant with other treatments for other conditions and so it's worth thinking about even if it's not the problem here.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I was under the impression that the hardware was powerful enough to be capable of running Playstation and N64 games - the GP2X, it's spiritual predecessor, was basically "everything up to Playstation". The Pandora is still allegedly the most powerful dedicated gaming handheld (compared to eg. PSP and DS) and has a good range of controls and expansion. I think that makes it reasonably interesting even though it's not as powerful as a smartphone. It'd be nice if they were able to rev the hardware to be more competitive with the high end handhelds again, though - maybe once they've sold a few they'll be able to do that, now their production chain is established.
Absolutely! Just worth bearing in mind that Intel's part-way solution of simply sharing a package is better in more ways than just being physically smaller. In that sense it's potentially a step up from the state of the art, even though it's a step behind a fully integrated solution.
I thought integration in the same package allowed (presumably for electrical reasons - very small physical distance, not limited by number of pins you can fit) a faster interconnect between the two dies, so there actually is (potentially) some advantage to doing it, even though it's not proper dual core.
Well, it violates their "family safe" goal / excuse, doesn't it? The other things referenced are also legal to enjoy (though in virtual sense in the case of excessive violence) yet frowned upon morally by some and definitely not generally considered family safe these days. The point is that Apple are again giving the lie to the excuses they've made when rejecting some other apps.
I don't know. Each time I get locked out of a product I've paid for on the grounds that I'm a pirate, I start to wonder if I should (having paid for the product) then use a cracked, pirated copy that won't lock me out. You could argue that that's a step towardsme giving up on paying but I really do *want* to pay a fair price, I just don't want there to be an effective surcharge in time and effort required to work around broken copy protection :-(
Reminds me of the days when you needed a password to access any given level of the game so you couldn't jump ahead - except implemented in software so that your *PC* doesn't cheat. Insane.
It only encourages them.
You're selling hardware, you're selling a high-end closed source database. Why bother annoying the customers by also charging for OS and runtime stuff that's pretty much a commodity?
"was added as part of an attempt to highlight how few customers read the terms and conditions of an online sale."
Interesting. To me it looks like an example of how retailers drown customers in excessive terms and conditions, leaving the retailer free to make unreasonable demands in bad faith if they so choose. I realise that GameStation were illustrating (in a humourous way, it was funny and good-natured) something that's worth knowing - that you are agreeing to whatever that says (in principle, subject to whether a court upholds the contract, you then have to abide by it). But really, if I want to buy a game in a bricks and mortar shop I just buy it, I don't have to wade through pages of T&Cs on my own time. That happens when I open the box ;-)
GameStation have moved their T&C page so that you don't even have to look at them during the order process, so it's not really surprising if people are treating their online shop like ... a shop.
With MeeGo (the Moblin-Maemo offspring), surely we could have a tablet that was more open than the iPad and closer to a standard Linux to develop for than Android. You could have an OMAP or an Atom processor depending on your price / performance / power draw constraints. If Dalvik's VM etc ran on it you could even have Android applications. That'd be far more attractive to me, giving me access to more applications whilst still retaining advantages for development and openness.
Though since rather addressed, there were grumbles early on that Apple weren't running the project in a co-operative way - they were abiding by the letter but not the spirit of the open source licensing. It's their right to do this but it used to upset people when Apple got credit for "contributing" when they were doing the bare minimum. But I think they reformed the WebKit project a lot and they're working rather in the open now, so I'm not sure that (generally) so much of this historical attitude remains at large.
The architecture is nice (IMHO) but the obscene amounts of cache do make it look bloated in terms of silicon required. This is partly because it's a high-end chip, of course. But perhaps Intel were also having to take a brute-force approach to performance there (throwing transistors at it) rather than an efficient solution. I'd be sorry to see IA64 go, though, I really liked the design of the instruction set.
Whilst I didn't like various of Russell T Davies work on Doctor Who, it is worth remembering that he brought it back from the dead, which was good. Whatever my personal feelings on who Also, I thought some of his scarier episodes (e.g. Midnight, Waters of Mars) were really very good at comparable to some of Moffat's stuff (hard to measure up to Blink, though).
Maybe (and I shudder as I say this) finding a way of supplying some of the more common search needs through channels that they control, rather than having people go out into the unruly and unstructured internet. They can't improve on Google's UI as such but maybe they can "improve" on the directedness of the search contents.
I still think the open approach wins out in the end since it's more powerful and gains more network effects - but Apple generally do very well at producing a comparatively locked-down solution that does some core things so much better than the existing attempts that people don't mind losing the flexibility ... for now.
In the video, the developer is demonstrating using Ubuntu and I think he mentions it specifically. Maybe that's where the choice of wording came from.
Arguably what I said was basically the flip side of what Angst Badger has posted above, describing why head-to-head competition in search would not appear to be a good plan for Apple: http://search.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1606786&cid=31726544
Apple does well when they change the game, rather than simply trying to win a race on somebody else's terms. They also seem to have a good understanding of where their own strengths lie. I can't see them trying to compete head-on with Google but if they can find a way to make Google's strengths less relevant then I can see them doing that. That said, it's not like Apple doesn't have a few flops / vanity projects under its belt and it is sometimes seen as a company that would potentially set business decisions based on personal feeling. Their compass on business decisions is fairly good overall though, even though I'm not at all keen on the direction they want to take the industry.
How flexible is it in other environments, though? The AIR app pictured is reconfiguring the UI in various ways depending on orientation, moving UI elements from a side-by-side configuration to a vertical configuration depending on orientation, etc. Whether that's clever or not probably depends on how much work the developer had to put in - if differently structured interfaces were coded up manually then that's not so impressive.
If the runtime can reconfigure a set of declared elements in sensible ways, that would be quite cool. Although the app demonstrated is relatively uncomplicated in terms of UI, it'd be interesting to see how this applied to a more complicated example. I did get the impression, from the video, that it was the ability to run flexibly on different screen configurations that they were trying to promote, not so much the fact that the code could run on different devices.
I think the video mentioned open sourcing the code in the future, at which point we'll all be able to see exactly how convenient to program they have managed to make this...
Part of the cleverness here seems to be that the app is (somehow) doing dynamic changes of layout, not just scaling or flowing widgets into a given area, so that you end up with a GUI that looks reasonably sane on different screen sizes, aspect ratios and orientations. That's quite a nifty trick although I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be available in other cross-platform development environments - maybe it already is. Still, I had heard that Flash is good for UI stuff even though we all hate having to run it to access web content.
Has anyone invoked this meme yet? I don't see it. It's relevant in this case because we really are seeing stuff that used to be native code done in the browser. If there's not a C->Javascript translator already then soon there will be. Google's native client can run compiled code. It's starting to look like we can expect a Linux kernel running in a web browser in the next few years. Not obviously that useful but would be cool and you can bet that people will find things to use it for ...
Whatsmore, Google makes it easy for a user to find known piracy websites, so they're complicit! If we say that linking to pirate stuff, not the act of copying it, is also illegal then how many steps removed do you need to be before it becomes OK? This is why I don't like the apparently common point of view that these sites "might as well" be infringing copyright.
Agreed that the average users isn't going to care. But don't forget that this isn't a loophole that Sony chose not to close, it's a feature that they publicised in the product they sold. Obnoxious as Microsoft have been with the Xbox in various ways they've only increased the supported feature set (whilst plugging holes that might have enabled me to install Linux - but they were holes, not publicised features). Once you've sold a product to people on the basis that it has a given featureset I don't think it is acceptable to actively remove features, even if they're not popular ones. Ceasing tech support (or even patches) for an unpopular feature is more acceptable. Or a truly optional upgrade that adds other features but removes an existing one.
The trouble with this change is that Sony are removing a feature from every Playstation out there: they're either removing OtherOS or removing PSN. You can't keep both, whether you accept or refuse the update.
If the situation really is as suggested then Sony are behaving very badly. Don't own a PS3 but wish you good luck in getting them to see the error of their ways! With luck they will quickly realise it's a bad plan.
To be fair the guy might have been concentrating on his studies to the exclusion of social networking-type activities. It's a valid point that social networking can be useful in getting onto the employment ladder, although I do think organisations sometimes rely a bit too heavily on personal connections to really get the best out of their recruitment. Still, it's a useful tool to many people who are looking for work and enables you to find the right people to talk to in order to get proper consideration made of your CV (and in some cases to find out where openings are coming and where is good to look).
I can't see the article at the moment for some reason, maybe they didn't like the Slashdotting. But as various people have said, offering the choice to be cured / altered doesn't seem wrong. However, possibly there's a real underlying point that curing these conditions isn't wrong per se but perhaps curing them wouldn't be necessary if we could fix some of society's behaviours. If we didn't always assume that everyone had the same perceptual experience then we wouldn't need to normalise people in order to participate. The flip side of a cure being everyone's choice is the tendency to say "Well, you can get a cure if you want" and not bother to make things accessible to people. Which if they have a fear or moral objections about gene therapy (say) implies pressuring people to do things they're not happy with by excluding them if they don't do the necessary actions to conform.
For the case of colour blindness it's not *that* debilitating for most people and it's probably too small and inconvenient an issue to pervasively "fix" in society any time soon simply because the condition isn't obvious to others and most people don't have it anyhow. Not having the cure isn't a serious problem and having the cure would also provide personal benefits beyond simply conforming, seeing more colours means you're getting more interesting inputs about the world. And various professions "discriminate" somewhat legitimately against colourblindness anyway so having the cure would at least give people options (examples include astronauts, pilots - you really want them to see the red warning light, though I'm skeptical about how much of a difference colour blindness really makes here if you still know where the lights are!). So I don't see that there's a great risk of unduly pressuring people to conform with this treatment.
There's a wider issue, though, which could become significant with other treatments for other conditions and so it's worth thinking about even if it's not the problem here.